A Vision of Fire

“I didn’t speak with Hansa but the ambassador’s emotional state has shifted. He’s less anxious but he seems more… ‘sad’ is the only word that fits. A part of it has to be the sense that he’s failing the peace process, but I also think he feels as though he’s failing his daughter. He said something about having to take some kind of action before she’s stuck like this for life. I told him you were making progress.” Ben looked at her. “Are you?”

“Maybe. I’ve got so much to share with you—”

Ben put a hand on her arm. “Before we get to that, I…”

Caitlin sensed he was struggling with something and put a warm hand on top of his.

“I feel guilty for putting this on you.” Ben looked at the pavement.

“Go ahead. Seriously. You know I’ll keep it confidential.”

“Okay. There is a rumor—and I want to stress that it is a rumor—that some countries are considering shutting down their embassies in India and Pakistan and flying out their employees. Countries that include us, the UK, and Japan.”

“Oh my god,” said Caitlin.

“God?” Ben said. “You see God in this? Anywhere?”

Caitlin didn’t answer. The question made her think of her vision, of millennia of prophets and shamans and mystics who had visions, of the ivory-tower debates about the difficulty of distinguishing between profound faith and dementia. She got back on topic. “The cliff you talked about on the phone. It’s that close to crumbling?”

“It might be a brinksmanship maneuver, but those have a catastrophic tendency to take on a life of their own. It could be politicos testing the water to see how everyone reacts, whether the Indian and Pakistani delegates will come back to the table given the right impetus.” He exhaled and rubbed the bone below his ear. “I just don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

He hesitated. “I think it’s a ploy.”

“Is that what you would say to me anyway, to keep me from worrying?”

“No, Caitlin. I would never play you.”

“Okay.” She pressed his hand again. “You know those Magritte umbrellas that look black to everyone else but underneath they’re blue sky and puffy white clouds? We’re going to stand under one of those. Because if I don’t ignore what you just told me, I won’t be able to focus.”

He nodded and half-smiled. “I just felt like one of your patients getting a safe-haven visual.”

“You were.” She half-smiled back, then jumped into a description of her trip, ending with the conversation with her father. “So, his crazy idea that my drawing invokes the Vikings—when I say it out loud it seems to lose some weight but, Ben, he was one hundred percent certain.”

“It’s not so crazy,” Ben said. “My linguistic programs broke down the snatches of language we have and I did some comparing. Part of what came out of Maanik’s mouth seems to be rooted in Old Norse.”

Caitlin stopped and gaped at him. Finally, at least some of the pieces were coming together. She allowed herself a big smile.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Ben. “There’s a strong strand of Mongolian as well.”

“Oh. But Mongolian and Norse had no connection, at least not that I know of.”

He shook his head and laughed. “None at all. Nor the snippets of Japanese. This kind of discovery could make history in certain circles. Last night, when I confirmed all those languages, was the most exciting night of my life. Thank you, Cai. You made it happen.”

“What every woman loves to hear!” She grinned and realized she was flirting. She blamed it on his infectious enthusiasm and switched back to professionalism: “Can you give me specifics?”

He spoke slowly and deliberately to make his point. “This hybrid language should not exist, but it does. And it makes sense. The hand gestures are superlatives but they apply to nouns as well as adjectives. So for example, if I say ‘hergha’”—he rolled the r and sort of hacked out the second syllable—“it means ‘fire.’ But if I say it while doing this”—he made a circle with his hand, the palm facing his torso, then pushed it to the side exactly as Maanik and Gaelle had both done at different points—“it means ‘the biggest fire,’ a conflagration.”

“Can we sit down?” Caitlin could hardly believe what she was hearing. She needed a bench to take it all in. She shook her head not just in awe but in relief. Seeing her old friend perform the gesture without an accompanying fit of screams and scratching was profoundly comforting.

“You are amazing,” she said.

“Eh, it’s just good software.” He grinned, shrugging away the compliment. “I only have about twenty-five percent of the words translated, and we don’t have that many to begin with. Nouns have been easiest. What’s most interesting to me is that the word for ‘fire’ and its superlative appear very near the word for ‘sky.’”

“Do you have any idea why?”